Given that eight of 11 presentations had a European focus, the
discussions were opened fittingly by Montreal scholar Daria Dyakonova
with a paper on a little-studied aspect of revolutionary history here in
Canada: the birth of communism in Quebec.

The pioneers of this movement faced objective obstacles, including
severe repression and formidable opposition by the Catholic Church. In
addition, Dyakonova explained, “after Lenin and especially after 1929”,
the Canadian Communist Party’s “policies were determined from Moscow”.
The line dictated by the leadership of the Communist International
(Comintern) was “often at odds with national or local needs”.

In 1924, the party had only 100 members in Quebec, few of whom were
French-speaking. Nonetheless, the party achieved much in these difficult
years, even electing a member of Canada’s parliament (Fred Rose) in
1945.

Diagnosing the downfall of Paul Levi

Frédéric Cyr, also of Montreal, summarised his recently completed
dissertation on Paul Levi (1883–1930), the central leader of German
communism for two years after Rosa Luxemburg’s murder in 1919. Study of
Levi, Cyr said, has focused on Our Road: Against Putschism,[1] the
pamphlet Levi wrote denouncing the Communist Party’s ultraleft policy in
the notorious March Action, a failed attempt to spark an
insurrectionary uprising in Germany. “You should read the pamphlet, but
it is not characteristic of his entire career”, Cyr said, since it does
not reveal his closeness to the Bolsheviks.

Levi met Lenin in 1916, and within a year was “one of Lenin’s closest
allies”, Cyr said. “He gave Lenin a Trojan Horse inside the Spartacus
movement” led by Luxemburg. It was Levi who convinced Luxemburg to agree
to the German Communist Party’s foundation in December 1918, he said.
Overall, Levi stood politically “somewhere between Rosa Luxemburg and
Lenin”.

How was it, then, that Levi came to be expelled from the Communist
movement in 1921 for publishing Our Road, a text with whose overall
thrust Lenin was in broad agreement? Cyr pointed to the role of
divergences in the Russian Bolshevik leadership.

During 1920, Cyr said, Lenin concluded that the Comintern must turn
away from an “offensive” policy and orient toward a united front. This
shift was evident in Lenin’s pamphlet, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, and in the
decisions of the International’s 1920 congress.[2] “Levi complied with –
indeed, anticipated – Lenin’s policy. But the Comintern continued to
apply the ‘offensive’ policy", Cyr said, leading to the March Action
fiasco. When Levi was expelled, “Lenin tried to get him back in” but
these attempts failed.

Gaps in the Bolshevik experience?

Paul Kellogg (Athabasca University) zeroed in on the various
explanations that have been offered for the March Action fiasco. Pierre
Broué leaves the question open, Kellogg noted. Many German Communists of
the time blamed the inexperience of German workers; British socialist
historian Chris Harman focuses on inadequacies in the German
leadership.[3] Yet in fact, Kellogg said, it was these very workers and
Communist leaders who worked out an alternative policy several months
before the March Action – the united front.

This innovation met with “sullen opposition from the Comintern
Executive”, including its most active Bolshevik members, Kellogg said.
“Why did the Russian Bolshevik leaders go wrong, and why did the German
Communists get it so right? In fact, the Bolsheviks were inexperienced
in the sphere of advanced capitalism.” Moreover, Bolshevik history was
not free of ultraleft errors similar to those of the March Action.

Biography of a leftist current

Giving the last paper in this session, I offered yet another
explanation. The Communist movement in Germany from the war years into
the mid-1920s was sharply divided between a wing that I termed
“mainstream”, led initially by Rosa Luxemburg, and a leftist current
whose best-known early leaders were Karl Radek and Paul Frölich. Each
wing went through several incarnations and shifts in leadership, but
retained continuity in essential policies.

The division had objective roots, I argued. The leftist current
reflected the outlook of younger and less skilled workers. The
revolutionary upsurge of 1918 in Germany been turned back, but economic
and political crisis continued. A vanguard of tens of thousands was
frustrated and impatient to act, while the majority of workers were
pessimistic and passive. Conditions were similar in neighbouring
countries.

“By mid-1920, the German leftists were expressing all the essentials
of the ‘Theory of the Offensive’ that led their party to disaster, a
year later, in the March Action”, I said. Certainly the Comintern executive “was complicit in steering the German party down this course”,
but there are signs that it was adapting to rather than directing the
dynamic leftist current in Central Europe.

Audience questions hinted at yet other approaches. Thus:

“Did the executive’s policy on the March Action reflect Gregory Zinoviev’s theory of the workers’ aristocracy?”

“Did the Comintern encounter a philosophical problem of theory and practice?”

“Would any correct policy have in fact led to a successful German revolution?”

Rosa Luxemburg’s misunderstood role

Leading off the second session on revolutionary history (see videosa of the presentations HERE), Helen Scott
(University of Vermont) challenged the “perennial orthodoxy that [Rosa]
Luxemburg’s political legacy is antithetical to that of Lenin and in
extension the Bolsheviks”.

In fact, said Scott, both Luxemburg and Lenin spent their lives
building socialist organistions. They looked to the model of the German
Social-Democratic Party (SPD) following adoption of the 1891 Erfurt
program and then, during the 1914–1918 World War, broke with the SPD and
set out to build a new International. “Throughout their lives they
often disagreed”, on some issues “consistently and fiercely. But they
were on the same side of many more battles”, Scott noted. Moreover,
their debates are “testimony to their commitment as Marxists to
democratic open debate”.

Luxemburg’s response to the Russian Revolution has been generally
misunderstood, Scott maintained. Luxemburg saw the faults of Bolshevik
policy mainly as “symptomatic of the daunting conditions facing a
national revolution that had not internationalized”. Thus, in a letter
to Polish communist Adolf Warski in 1918, she termed land distribution
to Russian peasants as “the most dangerous aspect … of the Russian
revolution” but drew from this the conclusion that “even the greatest
revolution can accomplish only that which has ripened as a result of
[historical] development".

In this letter, Luxemburg summed up her attitude to the Russian
October revolution as “enthusiasm combined with critical thought”.
Surely, Scott concluded, “this would have been [her] continued attitude
towards the Comintern, had she not been murdered on January 18 [1919]”.

‘Parties of a new type’

Lars Lih’s presentation to this session challenged received notions
about the Comintern’s formation from a different angle. It is commonly
held, he said, that the Bolsheviks built a “party of a new type” and
that the Comintern extended this model to a world scale. In fact,
neither Lenin nor the Comintern used the term “party of a new type”. It
originates with Stalin in 1938, whose “Short Course” history of
Bolshevism claimed its originality to lie in its dedication to
“relentlessly purging itself of ‘the filth of opportunism’”.

In reality, Lih said, the party of a new type was the German SPD in
the years after it adopted the Erfurt program (1891), with its policy of
a “permanent campaign” and of “building an alternative culture”. The
Bolsheviks sought to build a party like the SPD and found new ways of
applying the SPD’s tactics under tsarist rule. Lih has argued this view
extensively in the “1912 debate”.

“The Comintern did not reject this type of party; indeed, they are
responsible for its survival”, Lih said. As the Comintern moved in
1921–22 to adopt the united front policy and to fight for support from a
majority of workers, “we see the old forms, the permanent campaign”, in
a new context of “trying to be a revolutionary party in
non-revolutionary times”.

Transition to workers’ power

I was next up, for a presentation on the discussion at the Fourth
Comintern Congress of the demand for a “workers’ government”. To start
off, I cited the present situation in Greece. The largest left party,
Syriza, is calling for a “left government”, which many Marxists say
would be nothing more than a continuation of capitalist rule in new
guise. Meanwhile, a coalition of far-left groups, Antarsya, is calling for a revolution
to achieve workers’ power. Leaving aside the question where this
assessment of Syriza is accurate, I asked whether there was any
transitional approach that, as proposed in the Comintern’s Third
Congress, could provide a bridge between present struggles and the
socialist program of the revolution. The Fourth Congress call for a
workers’ government aimed to provide such a bridge.

The substance of my paper is available HERE
and needs no summary in this article. In conclusion, I said, “The Comintern
decisions should not be imposed on today’s vastly different reality,
whether in Greece or elsewhere. The value of its call for a workers’
government lies rather in awakening us to the fact that, even when there
is no revolution and no soviet-type network of workers’ councils,
workers can still find a way to initiate the struggle for governmental
power.”

Marxism and oppression

The third session, entitled “Race, Gender, Nation, and Class”, took
up Marxism’s relationship with social groupings subjected to various
forms of oppression.

New York-based historian Jacob Zumoff described the encounter between
the Russian Revolution and the US Black movement in the early
1920s. From the Comintern side, “all initiatives came from Moscow”,
Zumoff said. “The Comintern intervened forcefully in the US Communist
Party, placing the fight for Black liberation at the centre of its
work.”

Previously, the US Communist movement had continued the
“colour-blind” approach of the prewar Socialist movement and was “not in
any sense fighting black oppression”. Bolshevik leaders insisted on a
change of course. At the 1920 Comintern congress, Zumoff said, Lenin
insisted that John Reed speak on the Black struggle. “We have Reed’s
note to Lenin, saying he did not want to do this, together with Lenin’s
reply, saying, ‘Do it.’”

Revolutionary blacks joined the US Communist Party in the 1920s because of the Comintern’s anti-imperialism, Zumoff said.

In 1928, the Comintern decreed that Blacks in the US South were a
nation and called for their self-determination. “This was an error, an
expression of Stalinist degeneration”, Zumoff said. “Nonetheless, the
Communist Party did valuable and dangerous work on the Black question in
the years that followed.”

Islamism and Marxism: conflict and alliance

Rianne Subijanto, a researcher into Indonesian history, said that the
record of Islamist-Marxist relationships during the Lenin era
challenges any notion that they represent mutually exclusive categories.
“Muslims, who take guidance from religious belief, usually regarded
Communists as atheists.” As for Communists, their “friendly attitude
toward the Muslims was often ambivalent”, she said. “However, in
practical politics, communists and Muslims often found themselves united
for the same goal, that is, to struggle against Western imperialism.”

Subijanto noted a progression in Comintern views from the Second
Congress (1920), where Lenin said “it is necessary to struggle against
the pan-Islamic and pan-Asiatic movements”, and the Fourth Congress two
years later, which took a stance of “at least benign support of
pan-Islamist movements.” Moreover, at the Baku congress of 1920, several
speakers emphasised there was no contradiction between Islam and
communism.

The history of Islamism and communism should be seen “as a process
rather than the meeting of two fixed categories. Their relation is
mutually inclusive, rather than exclusive of each other…. [T]hey shaped
and were shaped by one another…. Alliance and conflicts are necessary
parts of their historical development.”

Women’s and communist movements as one

Himani Bannerji, based in both Kolkata and Toronto, said that in the
history of Indian toilers, women’s struggle and communism were not posed
as separate things. “That was inconceivable in India when I was growing
up.”

Women were prominent in the independence struggle from its beginnings
in the late 19th century. When the British split Bengal in 1905,
“women poured into an armed liberation movement”. Another armed movement
of women arose in 1941.

Later, the Communist Party became integrated into the electoral
framework of independent India, and its character changed, Bannerji
said. But throughout the earlier period, women and women’s concerns were
well integrated into the Communist movement.

Reading the Communist International

The final presentation, by Abigail Bakan, greeted the recent
publication of the proceedings of the Comintern’s 1922 World
Congress,[4] “allowing a mass, English-speaking audience to, in a sense,
‘attend’ the Fourth Congress”. But now our work begins, she said. “How
do we ‘read’ the Fourth Congress?”

Contemporary readings of the classical Marxist tradition, Bakan said,
emphasise “the similarities between the movements of today with those
that have come before us”. However, works such as the Fourth Congress
proceedings “bring to life the deliberations of activists and scholars
living in demonstrably different times. Many of the conversations and
debates are strikingly relevant, but others appear, sometimes
disturbingly, archaic.”

Regarding the “life and times” of women communists in 1922, for
example, “there is little to be nostalgic about”. The one-day congress
discussion on women showed them still struggling for the right to
participate on an equal footing in the Communist movement.

Quoting the editor of the Fourth Congress proceedings, John Riddell,
Bakan noted that both the main women reporters at the congress, Clara
Zetkin and Hertha Sturm, “commented on the prevalence in the [Communist]
parties of what is now termed male chauvinism, a judgment unwittingly
confirmed by chairman Alois Neurath in his patronising remarks at the
close of the discussion.”

Yet while some of today’s Marxists have “forgotten the complexities
of exploitation, oppression, and alienation”, Bakan said, “it is clear
that the Communists of the Fourth Congress were collectively embroiled
in these various types of human suffering, and struggles to challenge
them.”

The Fourth Congress proceedings “is not a textbook, but a history
book”, she said. “It is not a guide to how to think or act or
strategise, like reading a recipe book or a bible. But it is rich in
lessons of the incredibly challenging conditions of the time and some of
the efforts to build a new world of freedom.”

The Historical Materialism process – the conferences, the journal,
the publications, the networks – is part of “a kind of international,
intellectual social movement”, Bakan said. “We are really only at the
beginning of this process.”